Background: Currently, surveillance of non-fatal agricultural injuries in the U.S. mainly relies on national surveys, and to date, none of these surveys were formally reviewed. Our objective was to review and evaluate these survey-based systems, to identify critical gaps in them and provide recommendations to improve them.
Methods: We used the updated Center for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to describe each system and evaluate each system's attributes like simplicity, flexibility, data quality, timeliness, representativeness, etc.
Results: Four adult and two youth national surveys collected data for non-fatal agricultural injuries in the U.S. The evaluation identified three major gaps: 1) insufficient data quality attributed to non-response, measurement errors, and underreporting; 2) untimeliness of data; and 3) lack of flexibility to integrate with other existing systems.
Conclusion: Improving data quality, timeliness and flexibility will provide reliable and valid injury estimates, and increase the usefulness of these surveys for surveillance and prevention of farm injuries.
Keywords: United States; agricultural; non-fatal injury; surveillance; survey.
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